The visual plane is not merely a support in the son-image construct; instead it is the driver upon which all other references are supported. The representation of a society thrives on the visual plane in Fassbinder.

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Postmodernity and the Cinematic Object in the films of R. W. Fassbinder

Rainer Werner Fassbinder is the oft-relegated director of cinema, the fashionably forgotten Ghatak of Germany, always living up to his reputation but never really outdoing it. The director is easily one of the most significant directors of sound cinema along with the likes of such distinguished directors as Werner Herzog, Volker Schlöndroff and Alexander Kluge. Unlike the rest, Fassbinder has more definite interests, is much more theatrical and yet is able to transcend this theatricality with an insightful understanding of cinema as a medium. In this essay, I hope to address Fassbinder’s eccentric understanding of cinema as a medium in order to transcend all other references.       The concern in demonstrating an ‘understanding of cinema’ is to understand that film is about film. If this be the case then, images, situations and characters must be made with respect to the inherent qualities of the medium. Thus a camera movement if defined as a connection between two spaces, underlines the temporality in the same image. Thus the past or memory serves as theme which serves as dialectic with this temporality. Thus it is not a coincidence that such directors as Orson Welles, Alain Resnais and Wong Kar-wai use eccentric camera movements and regularly stress the importance of the past and memory. Thus it is through this mould of a cinematic act that a film is constructed. It is no mystery that the cinematic act is only derived from the cinematic object, an object which defines all the properties of the cinematic medium.

Just like a musical note which does not comment on anything outside the realm of music itself, a cinematic object comments only on the cinematographic positioning of a sequence in a film. A cinematic object is the property of film that separates it from other arts. It is an image or image/sound combination (son-image) which transcends representation, in order to facilitate stylisation within an image. It may also be defined as the image between a subject and an event. Therefore Hitchcock’s exemplary mastery over the medium is a result of his intricate sequences around the protagonist (subject) and the murder (event). Thus it is in the space between a subject and an event that the cinema can be manufactured. This simplistic explanation underlines the possibility of a purely temporal or time-based cinema, in which events, comments and subjects are overthrown by an understanding of cinema itself. This conception of cinema as one beyond space (representation) is closest to music than any other allied discipline.

With respect to other arts, an object may be defined as that intermediate point between subject,event and personality where the unfolding of an act is merged with the singular character of that medium .This ‘singular character’ is precisely what defines the ‘alphabet’ of that medium. This ‘alphabet’ is equivalent to line and shape in the visual arts, words in the literary arts and notes in the case of music. In the case of cinema this ‘alphabet’ is a shot. However since a shot need not have any relation to a cinematic object, we must correlate this to ‘movement image’

In the case of literature, this ‘object’ centers on a word, and leads to its semantic meaning. This is equated to the sensation produced by this semantic meaning. This process is one of smooth flow, of openings that terminate at infinity with meaning

In the case of cinema, audio-visual sensation leads to meaning. This syntax creates sensations which are eventually equated to meaning. Meaning is produced after the complete (100%) or partial (80%) of sensation recording is done by the viewer. Thus it is through achievement of meaning, through blockages and not openings that a cinematic object is created.

In the case of Fassbinder, this is a dynamic cinematic object. Before one can dissect what ‘dynamic’ means, one must understand the limitations of Fassbinder with respect to his apparent theatricality. This theatricality vanishes each time the film is read with respect to its editing (temporality manufactured by an author) and sound. The apparent theatricality of the actors equate them to forms within the visual (flat, plastic) image.

The image in Fassbinder is of outstanding importance. Unfortunately this may not be of much interest for those more interested in temporalities as experienced in Robert Bresson’s work. The visual plane is not merely a support in the son-image construct; instead it is the driver upon which all other references are supported. The representation of a society thrives on the visual plane in Fassbinder. Genres, or the combining of them are more based on visual clues, than sound clues or textual clues. Thus a visual serves as a stylisation for referring to theatre, for carefully calculating the distanciation required and moulding the other elements likewise. It is the chaotic juxtaposition of these visual elements that breaks any classic cinematic tool such as montage or the verité style documentaries.

Montage is broken through the careful detailing in each shot, accurately breaking any link between two images. This reduction in meaning brings about an increase in the camera distance which thereby allows a cinematic system to flow in each shot. Within this subjective understanding of Fassbinder, sound is almost unimportant. Sound does not add to the image. It increases its subjectivity to some extent. This subjectivity will culminate at the same point that the image will. It does not oppose the accelerated importance of the image track with every passing moment.

Camera movements, which often serve as distancing techniques, remind us of change. The change within an image is of primary importance. Thus movement is propelled by a camera, in a Fassbinder system most similar to still-Cubist paintings. This movement, often very slow to start with, and suddenly increases in pace mark the dialectic between movement and stillness. The variable styles in which the camera is moved serve as fresh comments on image by Fassbinder. More than the references it is the sudden, short span of the movements, which serve as a cinematic change, more like a symphony or a raga at a crucial point in its complex construction. In the case of a medium like film, this may not at all be a crucial point in the event stage or the subject stage. This increase in tempo without causality draws the filmmaker once again to the cinematic object.

These forms especially in his earlier films do not underline an understanding of theatre, but an understanding of cinema.

Fassbinder is not interested in political comment as he is aware of its impotency in a marginalised situation. Instead, he chooses to show us this political situation as an object within this marginalised space (post-war Germany). This object is abstracted to a dynamic space allocating several castes, classes and sociological backgrounds to it. This premeditated choice made by him, allows cinematic object to be a vehicle for these problematics. In this respect, the difference between a Fassbinder film and a Bresson (or in India, Mani Kaul) film is the former’s clarity of the tools he chooses to create this cinematic object. I shall try to present certain arguments in relation to one of these sources, namely modernist literature, and Fassbinder’s subsequent use of modernist literature as a tool to carry these spatial problems.

Fassbinder is influenced by Jean-Luc Godard. He enjoys creating a system where a character breaks open a space and thereby, like Godard, allows himself a plethora of possibilities. In the case of Godard, these possibilities are captured within the plasticity of the image. Therefore if he comments on a Hollywood noir work, he underlines his understanding of a film noir image, and argues that this image of a film noir is extraordinarily significant. The character is trapped within this image. He may try to break out of it (and this is a significant act, often more significant than the event; see A Bour De Souffle, 1959), accelerating a dialectic or élan vitale (Bergson; also see Godard’s Masculin Feminin, 1965), or even transcending a cinematic object itself (see the opening sequence of Deux Ou Trois Choses que je sais d’elle ,1966). Fassbinder is aware that the abstractions impossible in theatre are possible in cinema. Thus he uses this Godardian possibility to allow for the more plastic aspects of theatre. One author whose literature is certainly more cinematic than his plays is Beckett.

In the case of Samuel Beckett, an event is allowed. Watt works in an office, Malone is going to die, Molloy is in his mother’s room and has a son. This event allows a epistemological study of space. Using literature this objective is close to impossible. Beckett often resorts to a creation of images akin to Borges to further objectify this stubborn abstraction. Often this space is abstracted to the extent of being pure movement – more Stan Brakhage than Luis Buñuel in avant-garde cinema; more Yasujiro Ozu than Federico Fellini in classical cinema; and more Apichatpong Weerasethakul than Wong Kar-wai in postmodern cinema .In this scenario of unfolding, the viewer is waiting for the object to arrive. To demonstrate this, consider two extracts from Malone Dies by

Beckett :

1)      Nothing is more real than nothing.

2)       What a misfortune, the pencil must have slipped from my fingers, for I have only just succeeded in recovering it after forty-eight hours (see above) of intermittent efforts.

In the first example, a suitably abstract statement is objectified by using nothing as a material (Bergson) .This is further demonstrated by using the word ‘nothing’ twice. The ‘more real’, a comparative, serves in abstracting other parts of the sentence. Thus only ‘nothing’ or the void being created is an object, a material which is being studied. It is possible to study nothing only under the condition that one treats it like an object. On the other hand, the flow of narration before arriving at this point is quite abstract:

I don’t like those gulls eyes. They remind me of an old shipwreck. I forget which. I know it is a small thing. But I am easily frightened now. I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing. (Italics by author).

Sentence 1 is an opinion, 2 is a response to 1. But by the time we reach sentence 3 and 4, the subject is redundant. It is a repetition of an opinion and a response, summed up by sentence 5, a response to the pattern emergining in 1, 2  and 3 i.e. that of repeating the same opinion again and again. However, sentence 4 is also a confirmation of the fact that a trivial detail (not quite an event) is being repeated, and now there must be a significant progression to break out of this banal comment. Sentence 6 does this. It is not important to see what is being represented, but how a representation alters its path to transcend representation. What is most notable is the fact that it is through void that repetition is broken. This is done through, if one can say, a literary object, a word which serves as an abstraction or vivid description of itself. As compared to other modernists like Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, Beckett is clever to use voids in objects instead of descriptions in objects (which do not manipulate space in a complete way ) to create objects of literature. This allows for the possibility of a moving medium like cinema as opposed to a flattened plastic description, which is more akin to painting, especially Cubism, than cinema. In this respect, some of Godard’s earlier work (which peaked in 1967 with the post-Cubist La Chinoise) serves as mediation on Joyce’s work through Beckett.

On the one hand, the cinematic object dominates the temporality of an image (see Ernie Gehr’s Shift); while on the other extreme, the representation is not at all cinematic, or it takes away the natural properties of movement in the cinematic image, without even addressing the object. Fassbinder’s much talked about obsession with sexuality, thus comes up from this understanding of the limits of the cinematic object. However, it has often been noted that this notion of cinema is not self-conscious. In fact, it is just an exaggeration of the cinematic object to include the possibilities of sexual commentary, beyond its obvious representation (meaning). Beckett once again serves ample proof of this:

Mr. Hackett decided, after some moments, that if they were waiting for a tram they had been doing so for some time. For the young lady held the gentleman by the ears, and the gentleman’s hand was on the lady’s thigh, and the lady’s tongue was in the gentleman’s mouth… The lady now removing her tongue from the gentleman’s mouth, he put his into hers. Fair do, said Mr. Hackett. Taking a pace forward, to satisfy himself that the gentleman’s other hand was not going to waste, Mr Hackett was shocked to find it hanging limply dangling over the back of the seat, with between its fingers the spent three quarters of a cigarette.

The outstanding movement within meaning can be seen by paying attention to the hand. It begins as a hand with a role, then becomes one which is still a part of otherwise moving objects, and ultimately becomes an isolated ‘dangling’ object transcending its meaning as well as the space within which it has been described. Thus the description of a scenario (representation), its impressionistic transcendence (as in Flaubert), temporality (as in Proust) are transcended by the nullification of meaning. It’s a hand here, but it could be any other object. One notices the denial of movement in an activity that is based on motion. Fassbinder similarly denies movement to give context to cinematic object:

1)                          His use of camera movements to entrap space (Beckett) and not characters (See: Jean Renoir’s Rules of The Game)

2)                          Eccentric zoom-ins and zoom-outs, to denote the limits of the frame. This effect is heightened in In A Year With 13 Moons (1974), where architecture is used to denote this forever changing space (Beckett).

3)                          Fassbinder’s deep concerns with the problems of sexuality are best expressed in his understanding of expressionist art. In the case of Edvard Munch’s Scream, inertia is being developed. Perhaps this inertia will result in an actual scream (sound) at an infinite distance from the painting itself. This tension within an apparently disturbed vision of humanity is given resonance by an accomplished artist like Fassbinder.

4)                          Point 3 is further made effective by the medium of cinema which literally allows for the separation of image and sound. Thus sound can be dissonant to different degress. In the case of Fassbinder, this dissonance does not create dissonant rhythms but voids in the soundtrack. In this respect, Fassbinder has mastery over a post-Hollywood sound design, where fewer sounds than images (Godard) create a valid political cinema. This challenges Godard’s statement of sound being more important than image. One can only attribute this to Fassbinder’s thorough understanding of theatre.

Fassbinder is able to address this concern through his constant re-addressing of distancing. At the same time, his is also very aware of the infinity beyond which his characters cease to exist. This distancing isn’t always Brechtian or theatrical, but largely through references to paintings and negations of perspective. Whether it be the flat spaces of  The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant (Goya meets Cubism) or the white spaces of Love Is Colder than Death (feminist cinema meets Paul Klee), there is an underlying understanding of painting (in which the actor is just a  part of the image) as opposed to theatre (in which stylisation revolves around the actor) However, Fassbinder does not give this painting a context by using music. In this respect, one sees Godard having a dialogue with Fassbinder in Prenom Carmen (Godard, 1984). Godard is making us aware what a Fassbinder film would become if music would be incorporated into the cinematographic system. A definite aspect of this musical cinema is the involvement of the more documentary aspects of film. In this respect, Fassbinder refuses to show us fixed, distanced shots of locations unless for a convenient purpose such as titles, break from an intense segment, etc. In this sense, he is working within the rigid confines of theatre.

The curious aspect which one sees Fassbinder avoiding, especially with respect  to Godard, is the use of the documentary. Curious exceptions to this rule are seen in such works as Niklauhsen Journey (1970), in which Fassbinder is willing to spend more time and thus get more involved with the ‘possibilities’ (Godard) of an image. From a more non-representational (Levinas) stand point, one sees Godard being able to stand for separation (Levinas), while Fassbinder is more interested in exteriority (Levinas). This makes Fassbinder an extroverted and more material version of Godard, perhaps not commenting politically, but just angry (see Samuel Beckett’s Watt). This is what eventually makes his work more ‘shortcut’ and formulaic than it could have been, especially if the possibilities of interiority (a non-event-based ellipse) and separation (formal differentiation) were taken into account. In this respect, he is also the prototype for the future genre filmmakers like Takashi Miike, who continue to fail to take into account this interiority and separation. Often Fassbinder’s superior work turns out as a more modernist version (Hitchcockian possibilities in movement used as alphabet and not reference) of a genre film without the whimsical element in the combining of genres, especially with respect to narrative.

While Fassbinder is aware of the effects of distancing, he is also aware of the limits of this distancing. The limits beyond which the characters cease to exist, serve as a constant calculation for determining the appearance (and disappearance) of his 0 and infinity. In this respect, Fassbinder is the director of number lines; 0 need not be the centre, but as always, it will be the centre that allows the limits at either end. Within this scenario of clear limits, a Fassbinderian object is possible, never moving but still approaching a dissonant object; and sound as a dissonant signifier is dispensed with almost entirely. This clever manipulation of number lines allows for the assimilation of several facets of cinema, including the postmodern genre.

If Fassbinder is a precursor to genre, it is because, unlike Jean-Pierre Melville (the other more classical, even Bressonian, father of genre cinema), he is a materialist who thinks of characters as material for expression. By ‘material’ my explicit reference is to materialist cinema (as seen by Soviets): the postmodern Left (Vera Chytilova’s Daisies, 1966), the feminist (Love is Colder than Death, an influence on the work of  Chantal Akerman), the political (The Niklauhsen Journey as German One Plus One-meets-road film), the social (Fassbinder’s Mother Kusters goes to Heaven, in which one sees a non-inclusive, pre-modern understanding of ‘social cinema’). But all of these were unable to address/comment on transcendence (without necessarily subscribing to it) and  thus making medium (Levinas, Delueze) as being representational and not interested in eccentric/dynamic nature of truth.

This makes Fassbinder’s cinema one capable of an immediate death, and if not an immediate death, an expiry of ideas, of binaries, only equaled, perhaps, by a representation of the death of cinema itself. Thus, ‘Fassbinder representing a death in cinema’ (Kaushik Bhaumik) occurs precisely due to his ignorance of the cinematic object. To be more precise, it is his ignorance of the possibilities of documentary in determining this cinematic object. Furthermore, this will terminate in a materialist cinema with ‘anachronistic images’ and redundancy of individuation (much like the neo German-Turkish directors, including Fateh Akin). Issues relating to space will be equated to cinematic space, thus erasing the element of rhythm in cinematic object. Thus the use of the political reel as a postmodern tool does not serve any other purpose than stereotyping itself as a representation of generic space. In this context, Akin is the dead-Fassbinder and Haneke, the dead Godard. Postmodernity has invested them with archaic tools unable to address anything other than semantic clichés.

In this context, Fassbinder is able to avoid memory, and thus addresses a material transcendence where continuity replaces repetition (Delueze). Thus where a Wong Kar-wai cannot escape a repetition through memory, Fassbinder is able to use the cinema to show you objects existing only in the present. This does not make him superior to a  Resnais (obsessed with memory), but is able to address a materialist form of cinema which addresses an absence of transcendence. In the case of Luis Buñuel, particularly his last films, a materialist problematic is deconstructed in a Balzacian way to arrive at a dynamic equilibrium. Fassbinder takes off from this Buñuel settlement within which the disturbance of an individual (see The Bitter tears of Petra Von Kant) or a micro society (see Katzelmacher) is eccentric and uneven, only sufficiently bringing about a nostalgic recollection of cinematic object. It is precisely this sophisticated understanding of materialism that makes Fassbinder outstanding among the multidisciplinary directors, that is those who adapt several media most commonly theatre, literature and music.

It is this absence of memory that creates a cinema forever ascending towards an avant-garde cinema, where the possibility of a reverse shot is removed. Thus a Hans Richter film rhythm or a Brakhage entomology exercise, does not allow the possibility of a reverse shot to account for the strayed accounts of  memory, of a dialectic Other always hindering the possibility of being. However this being does operate within a Bergsonian life force forever expanding to allocate the possibilities of a material time, which thereby allows its own infinite possibilities, never limited by a Rivette ‘crystal’, yet always expanding towards the Bressonian ideal of ‘the image which exists without the idea of the image.’ In the case of Fassbinder it is precisely because of his blatant ignorance of several intellectual possibilities that his cinema remains without an Other.

Thus if Love is Colder than Death is Godard without a consideration of a Bressonian pure space, Effi Briest is Visconti mixed with Hitchcockian formalism. While ‘the effects of montage are nullified’ (Kaushik Bhaumik), the possibilities of a Bressonian temporality of sound over image is dissonant with respect to Fassbinder’s manipulation of mise-en-scene. The mise-en-scene is manipulated beyond a temporality, a possibility of itself, a capturing of a visual flatness (documentary), while yet fragmented without a reference to Cubism. Perhaps this is possible due to Fassbinder’s clarity on the ways in which a scene can be shot and his sequential selection of the best possible scene.

It is precisely this denial of a purely avant-garde film that makes an artist avoid the possibility of an Infinity.The reference of the Other even more than the awareness of the Self makes one aware of the finite set. The complete. In mathematical A U B or A (Self) union B (Other)which prevents the possibility of an A union B complement i.e. everything other than the union of the self and the other i.e. infinity. It is precisely this intentional denial of infinity that makes Fassbinder a stern political commentator. In the case of Godard, this infinity, which albeit makes him an idealist, serves as a profound acceptance of the problems of humanity. A denial of this infinity results in the gross politicisation of an Other, without necessary defining the Other.

With respect to this artist’s apparent self-reflexivity, the Self and the Other are again addressed. I shall refer to a passage on “self consciousness” from Totality and Infinity by Levinas:

Self consciousness is not a dialectical rejoinder of the metaphysical consciousness that I have of the other. Nor its relation of itself a representation of itself….It thus accomplishes separation positively, without being reducible to a negation of the being from which it separates. But thus precisely it can welcome that being.’

Earlier Levinas links violence to totality:

Violence in nature thus refers to an existence precisely not limited by an other…Totality absorbs the multiplicity of human beings, which peace implies. Only beings capable of war can rise to peace. War like peace presupposes beings structured otherwise than as parts of a totality.

Fassbinder is interested in analysing an historical violence and the role class plays in re-creating this violence. This creation of violence is circular – it will come and go. It is this extroverted presence of violence in his characters that gives Fassbinder hope of a transcendence, since this violence is eventually crystallised as a keen awareness. Within this awareness rests a destruction of memory.

Whether Fassbinder’s repertoire continues to be redefined by a new set of directors is yet to be seen. However, the sheer dissonance in his large body of work can only be understood through a deconstruction of cinema itself.

Tags: Fassbinder, German Cinema., Volume No-2 Issue no 1 March 2010

Posted By Devdutt Trivedi | Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 | Filed under Auteur, News